By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

This volume contains a selection of 20 papers given at the Thirty-Third Linguistic Symposium on the Romance Languages, held at Indiana University in April 24-27, 2004. Linguists as well as those interested in the theory and acquisition of morphology, phonology, semantics and syntax will find a range of specialised research discussed within this volume.

In 'Case, Agreement, and Expletives: A Parametric Difference in Old French and Modern French', Arteaga and Herschensohn reexamine the distribution expletives and case agreement. They focus on subject-verb agreement patterns and case assignment and propose that neuter subject pronoun 'il' merges at CP only to satisfy the EPP of C like in the example 'il arrive des filles' (some girls are coming). They argue that the richness of overt morphology determines the availability of uninterpretable features, and thus derive the 'syntax directly from the morphology of the language' (p13).

In 'Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Relations in Italian Verbal Inflection', Burzio defends the relatively traditional view that affixes play a crucial role in conditioning the form of their stems in Italian. His analysis relies on his framework and works against Pirelli and Battista's (2000) claim that the stem form is purely a function of the paradigm cell in which it appears. He argues that although Pirelli and Battista are correct in highlighting the role of paradigmatic relations, they fail to factor in the phonology which is responsible for many of the syntagmatic ones.

Cabrera and Zubizarreta's 'The Role of the L1 in the Overgeneralization of Causatives in L2 English and L2 Spanish' is an empirical study conducted with 153 informants of different levels of proficiency which investigates whether the L1 properties of lexical causatives are reflected in the interlanguage of L1 English/L2 Spanish and L1 Spanish/L2 English adult learners, as far as overgeneralization of causatives is concerned. Their findings suggest that the L2 learners make use of different aspects of their L1 knowledge at different levels of proficiency. They propose that 'non advanced learners tend to focus on the L1 constructional properties of causatives whereas advanced learners focus on L1 specific lexical properties of verb class' (p45).

In 'The Inchoative Interpretation of the IMPERFECTO', Cipria focuses on Spanish and highlights the fact that 'there is an important difference in how the atelicity of the IMPERFECTO affects the aktionsart of its clause in different environment' (p79). She concludes that such a process is only justifiable for the special telic reading of the IMPERFECTO arising in combination with temporal adverbials.

After reviewing the articulatory and acoustic characteristics of palatal laterals and glides, Colantori accounts for the change in palatals in Corrientes Spanish in 'Reinterpreting the CV Transition. Emergence of the glides as an allophone of the palatal lateral'. She shows that there is a glide in the CV coarticulation in Corrientes Spanish. She concludes that the observed allophonic pattern is a consequence of both the presence of a glide in the CV transition and a change in quality of the palatal lateral, which mainly involves a more open articulation. Hence the increasing similarity between the palatal lateral and the glide.

In 'Intervocalic Velar Nasals in Galician', Colina considers historical and cross-linguistic facts as part of an Optimality Theory account in order to offer additional support for the underlying nature of the velar nasals in this Romance language of northwestern Spain. This Optimality Theoretic analysis proposed for the Galician data also accounts for diachronic and synchronic data in Portuguese and Gascon, thus 'shedding light on the grammars of those languages' (p119).

In 'Null Objects in French and English', Cummins and Roberge wish to sketch out the semantic and syntactic characteristics of three types of null objects, and the role that pragmatic principles play in their recovery. They claim that the existence of null objects is largely determined by the Transitivity Requirement, whereby an object position is always included in VP, independently of the lexical choice of the verb.

Déprez and Martineau's 'Micro-Parametric Variation and Negative Concord' proposes to compare the properties of negative concord in Standard French in relation to Quebec French and French-based Creole in order to better analyse the factors that condition and limit observed micro-parametric variations. They suggest that 'movement internal to the nominal structure of N-words could account for the variations observed synchronically and diachronically among the distinct dialects' (p156).

Eguren and Sánchez's 'Contrast and Addition in Romance' is a case study on the expression of contrast and addition in French and Spanish, respectively 'AUTRE' and 'OTRO'. They show that two major loci for microvariation between Spanish and French -- and among Romance languages more generally, in particular Italian, Portuguese and Catalan which they also compare in the study -- can be found with respect to these lexical items. Eguren and Sánchez show that OTRO in Spanish clearly belongs to the determiner word class, whereas French AUTRE is an adjective but also behaves like an additive degree operator.

In 'On the Structure of Syncretism in Romanian Conjugation', Feldstein shows that both Stump (2001) and Bobaljik (2002) operate with the 'inadequacy of' traditional textbook approach to present tense syncretism of Romanian conjugation. This syncretism leads them to make analytical errors whereby they do not distinguish phonologically conditioned -- or variable syncretism -- from invariant syncretisms that have nothing to do with particular phonological environment.

'Sluicing in Romanian' is a typological study where Hoyt and Teodorescu discuss the similarities between Romanian, Japanese and English sluicing. The study underlines the fact that the three languages have comparable semantics, however Romanian and English sluicing has one general kind of structure while 'that is disjoint with the structure of Japanese sluicing' (p214).

In 'Romance Intonation from a Comparative and Diachronic Perspective', Hualde uses a comparative approach to reconstruct aspects of the evolution of Romance patterns of intonation. He discusses features such as nuclear-accent patterns in Romance languages which are different from English ones. He acknowledges French as the most divergent Romance language in intonational respects, and argues that modern Occitan could represent an intermediate stage in the evolution of French as far as intonation is concerned.

Kempchinsky's 'Romance SE as an aspectual element' examines the morpheme SE --French/Spanish/Portuguese SE, and Italian SI -- in two different manifestations: a reflexive and an ergative or inchoative SE. She proposes that SE is primarily an aspectual element and concludes that 'the specific ways in which SE interacts with event structure will yield as a consequence of the variety of syntactic constructions in which it is found' (p240).

In 'Proto-Romance *[w] and the velar preterites', Lief shows that there is no support for w > gw. He reformulates the original sound change (bw > gw) and proposes a mechanism for its analogical extension throughout the Old Occitan and Catalan past tense systems. To demonstrate the likelihood of analogy with HAVE he examines Spanish and Portuguese perfects where the influence of HAVE is unequivocal.

Lloret's 'The phonological role of paradigms' reviews the behaviour of the inflected forms of insular Catalan with respect to vowel insertion and concludes that Optimal Paradigms model better captures the fact that in some languages nouns and verbs may differ phonologically in a way that is somehow connected with differences in their paradigms. Her analysis provides a novel type of evidence for the OP model, ie dialectal variation due to the reranking of OP constraints.

Within the Optimality Theory framework, Martínez-Gil's 'A constraint-based analysis of Galician GEADA' provides a formal account for the quasi-complementary surface distribution of the velars [g] and [x] found in the 'geada' dialects of Galician. He proposes underlying /x/ and derives [g] after nasals within morphemes, thus crucially resorting 'to the local conjunction of faithfulness and markedness constraints' (p299).

O'Rourke's 'Peak placement in Peruvian Spanish' offers an analysis of two regional varieties of Spanish spoken in Peru with respect to the placement of peaks. Lima speakers and some Cusco speakers are found to follow the trait observed in other Spanish varieties of realizing prenuclear peaks on the post-tonic syllable in open syllables within broad-focus declaratives. However alternate intonation patterns occur in the speech of some Cusco speakers which could be explained by the long-standing language contact situation with Quechua.

In 'On intentional causation in Italian', Vecchiato focuses on the existence of a tacit intentional predicate in Italian which accounts 'for the ambiguity of sentences with QUASI, the ban on some particular causal dynamics with causative FARE, and the interpretation of the predicate proform LO, all phenomena for which the asymmetry between intentional and unintentional causation' (p359) is a covert distinction unlike other languages.

Vicente's 'Inversion, reconstruction, and structure of relative clauses' argues in favour of a double-headed analysis of restrictive relative clauses. Using a data set from Spanish and comparing with its English counterpart, Vicente presents a theory that provides a 'means to derive all kinds of relatives in a strikingly similar way' (p377).

In 'Infinitival complement constructions in Spanish', Yoon argues that Construction Grammar better explains Spanish infinitival complement constructions by accounting for semantic as well as syntactic aspects that many formal approaches have attributed to the individual meanings of the verbs.

EVALUATION

This volume is not for those without background knowledge in the fields addressed. It contains very insightful articles on issues of the highest interest to phoneticians, morphologists, syntacticians, and cognitive linguists. They touch upon several Romance languages with a major emphasis on Spanish.

The articles presented in this volume all reveal a high standard of methodology and are for the most part well-structured. The majority are very well supported by precise examples, and have a well-developed research plan. Only one article does not have a proper conclusion, which prevents the reader from having a real sense of achievement in this case.

I particularly liked the alphabetical arrangement of the articles in the volume. It makes it much easier to keep interested. However I would have liked to read on a wider range of Romance languages.

Most of the articles have been well proof-read; I found only one substantive error -- on page 257, "radical" appears with the feminine article "la". I appreciated the fact that the articles are provided with acronyms in full, which makes their understanding much easier.

A major regret, though, is that since this volume is dedicated to Albert Valdman, it would have been nice to have had more pedagogical aspects discussed in the volume, and maybe more empirical studies.

Isabelle Lemée is an Assistant Professor at State University of New York at Albany and currently teaches Spoken Language as well as Language Teaching Methodology. Her research interests include Second Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics and Language Variation.